Polis apologized yesterday. "I did not mean to offend nor to show anything less than a strong sense of remorse for the loss of the Rocky," his release stated, its somber tone in stark contrast to his self-congratulatory giggling this weekend before a Netroots Nation event. But his apology is unlikely to quiet the talk from media old and new, particularly when the discussion includes revelations like this comment posted yesterday by Sandra Fish:

Rep. Polis would far prefer the kind of new media he helped fund in ColoradoConfidential.com. When the August 2007 [story] broke about his blogger slamming his two opponents in a post, the managing editor refused to let anyone write a post about it, saying that Polis was a funder of the site, that the blogger was a friend of hers and that Polis paid for her, the blogger and others from Colorado Confidential to attend a netroots conference in Chicago the weekend before.

That's why i left Colorado Confidential -- because i wanted to work in journalism, not a politician's thinly veiled campaign.

Fish, a longtime pro who's currently a journalism instructor at the University of Colorado, doesn't say whether Polis knew of the managing editor coming to his defense over another Netroots-related controversy.

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But right now, www.coloradoindependent.com, the former Colorado Confidential, is just about the only Colorado media outlet -- old or new, mainstream or progressive -- ignoring the latest Polis blunder.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword in 1977; she’s been the editor ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly CPT12 roundtable Colorado Inside Out, played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City, once interviewed President Bill Clinton while wearing flip-flops, and has been honored with numerous national awards for her columns and feature-writing.